Castro extolled the proposal during most of his annual “Mayor's Vision for San Antonio” speech at the Oak Hills Country Club to a sold-out crowd, previewing the full-court press he will almost certainly make to voters after an expected City Council decision next week to put the 1/8-cent sales tax increase on the November ballot.

If approved, it would raise an average of $31 million a year to increase the quality and quantity of pre-kindergarten education for thousands of San Antonio 4-year-olds.

Facing some of the city's top business leaders, Castro tackled potential questions head on.

“The truth is, the city has been involved in education for quite a while,” he said, mentioning past initiatives such as the After-School Challenge spearheaded by then-mayor, now County Judge Nelson Wolff in the 1990s.

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Acknowledging that “tax” is largely considered a four-letter word these days, Castro emphasized the minimal impact taxpayers would feel: less than $8 a year in a median-income household.

On the bigger picture, though, everyone can agree, he suggested.

“There is nothing this city needs more than more children who are well-educated. I know many of you can tell quite a story about the difficulty of finding high-skilled workers in our own region,” Castro said.

That difficulty “comes up in every meeting we have,” acknowledged North Chamber CEO Duane Wilson, who also sits on a joint city-county business retention and expansion team. “We always hear, ‘We need more skilled workers.'”

Wilson said the city did “a great job” answering outstanding questions about the proposal during a marathon 41/2-hour City Council work session Thursday.

“From our standpoint, accountability is going to be very important,” he said, suggesting perhaps semi-annual reports to the council on the initiative's progress.

If approved, the program would run for eight years before voters would be asked to reauthorize it. That includes three years to ramp up and five to gather data that measure whether the target goal, which Castro said is a “10 percent increase in third-grade achievement” is being reached.

Wolff said he thinks the business community will ultimately come out in support of the initiative. Voters will too, he said — if they're clearly shown where the money is going and what good it's doing.

The focus on pre-kindergarten, rather than waiting until a child is already behind in school, is the right one, he said, “because by the time someone turns 5, the lights are either on or off.”

Past efforts have not dramatically improved the problem of low educational achievement in San Antonio, said the chamber's Wilson.